Professor Emerita Joan Waugh of the UCLA History Department researches and writes about nineteenth-century America, specializing in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age eras. Waugh has published numerous essays and books on Civil War and Gilded Age topics, including U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth. (2009) and The American War: A History of the Civil War Era (2015; 2nd edition, 2019) co-authored with Gary W. Gallagher.
Other books include Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell (1998); The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (2005), and Wars Within a War: Controversy and Conflict Over the American Civil War (2009).
President of the Society of Civil War Historians from 2020-2022, Waugh is often invited to give public lectures about the Civil War. She has been interviewed for many documentaries, including the PBS series, “American Experience” on Ulysses S. Grant and the History Channel’s production of “Lee and Grant” (2011). In addition to seminars, Dr. Waugh taught the “Civil War and Reconstruction,” and “Gilded Age America, 1865-1900” lecture courses, and has been honored with three teaching prizes, including UCLA’s prestigious Distinguished Teaching Award. She was appointed a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar from 2021-2023. Waugh’s current project includes an exploration of the nature of U.S. Grant’s surrender policy during the Civil War.